Social Parasitism In Humans (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

counterfire |  It is not surprising that Marx’s concept of class is unpopular in the mainstream. Marx’s picture of a brutally divided society with organised robbery at its heart amounts to a devastating moral condemnation of capitalism. It also directly contradicts the various ways in which the establishment want us to understand the world we live in. Their preferred model of society is a giant market in which individuals interact freely and equally. In reality, of course, individuals are born into society with drastically different levels of wealth. Marx stressed however that it is the way production is organised that more than anything shapes society. ‘The arrangement of distribution’ he says in Capital, ‘is entirely dependent on the arrangement of production’. What people consume, even what people regard as needs, depends in the first instance on what is produced in any given society. The way the goods are distributed depends on the distribution of wealth, itself determined by one’s position in the productive process.

Politicians also like to tell us ‘we are all in it together.’ This illusion can only gain traction because the economy appears to operate independently of human will and control. The idea can’t survive contact with an understanding that the whole system is driven by a tiny minority forcing profit from the labour of the many. We are also told that capitalist investors are ‘wealth creators’. Looked at from the point of view of class, the capital that an investor brings to the table has been extracted – stolen – from past labour. The investor is simply recycling the spoils to make still more money.

Marxism also challenges the idea that capitalism will ‘lift up’ the poor over time. Capitalism has produced unimaginable wealth, but as Marx predicted, its drive to keep wages down means that for most of its existence the distribution of that wealth has become more and more unequal. Forty years of neoliberal capitalism has brought us to the extraordinary point at which just eight men are worth as much as half the world’s population. Marx’s analysis leads to the devastating conclusion that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Generalised poverty and inequality are a necessary outcome of a system based on competition for profit.

The most radical aspect of all of Marx’s class analysis is however that it shows that in the process of conquering the world and achieving by far the highest levels of exploitation in history, capitalism has created its own nemesis, its own ‘grave digger’ in the working class. Marx believed workers had the potential to overthrow existing conditions for a number of reasons. The first was directly economic. The fact that workers are denied the material benefits of a more and more productive society gave them an immediate interest in resistance. The second was that the degradation experienced by most of humanity under capitalism was concentrated in the working class. The denial of human self-fulfilment, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’, was most acutely experienced in exploitation and its attendant alienation. Workers have through their experience the most acute consciousness of the immensely destructive and degrading capacities of capitalist accumulation.

Secondly, as well as having an interest in change, workers have the means to make it happen. Just as workers rely entirely on capitalists for their livelihood, capitalists are completely dependent on workers for their profits. Powerless as individuals, collectively, workers have immense potential power. As Marx put it, ‘of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself’. By forcing huge numbers of workers together at the point of production, capitalism creates a counter-power. Struggles over pay and conditions have the capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations:

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination… If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Social Parasitism In Ants (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

quantamagazine |  When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi). In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop wings. What made this even stranger was that clonal raider ants don’t even have queens: In keeping with their name, these ants reproduce asexually, so all the ants in a colony are nearly perfect genetic clones.

Kronauer was intrigued by the miniature queens because they seemed so different from the other clonal raider ants even though he believed them to be the same species. But answers to his questions weren’t forthcoming, so he took some specimens, shot some photos for records and then moved on with his work.

A few years later, Kronauer established a lab at Rockefeller University and set up a colony of clonal raider ants for study. One day, his then-doctoral student Buck Trible found a few more of the odd miniature queens in that colony and decided to characterize them.

Trible found that the wings weren’t the ants’ only unusual characteristic. The strange ants also showed different social behaviors, had larger ovaries and laid twice as many eggs. Using genetic tools, he traced all of these changes to a 2.25-million-base-pair-long stretch of DNA. In the ordinary ants, the DNA on each of the two copies of their chromosome 13 was different. But in the miniature-queen ants, the two copies were identical.

As Trible, Kronauer and their colleagues reported in March in Current Biology, all of the characteristics of the odd ants — the wings, the social behaviors and the reproductive traits — were caused by what geneticists call a supergene, a collection of genes that are inherited as a unit and are highly resistant to being broken up. At some point in their evolution, the ants had acquired a second copy of that supergene, and that chromosomal change had transformed their bodies and behaviors. The findings suggested a new mechanism for how complex combinations of body parts and behaviors can sometimes surface all at once in evolution: through a mutation that duplicates a supergene, toggling on entire suites of traits like strings of lights controlled by a light switch.

Ant researchers are excited by the work, and not just because it seems to solve a decades-old mystery about how at least one form of social parasitism evolves in the insects. The supergene discoveries may also help them pin down long-sought features in ants’ genetic architecture that make their colonies develop as hierarchical castes of queens and workers.

More broadly, the new study also offers insights into a fundamental evolutionary question about how different the individuals in a single species can be.

Just How Much Damage Will One Ignorant Old Criminal Joe Biden Be Allowed To Do?

kunstler  |  Reality has become so elastic in America now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money laundering and racketeering operations.

     In fact, the committee outlined a shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank accounts it landed in. Thus: No evidence of wrongdoing.

      Meanwhile, another whistleblower from the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme. Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah….

     Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration:

I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source.
They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter
was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger,
the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.
This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer
is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.

It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stefan ‘Hamburger’ Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive intelligence, methods and foreign sources.

  Would they dare pull this one with Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him. The people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes. Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.

    Does the Party of Chaos actually suppose they can keep pretending “Joe Biden” will run for a second term? Articles of impeachment await for bribery, at least, and perhaps treason. At this point, the case couldn’t be more clear-cut. The House is solely in-charge of the impeachment process. The hearings will be brutal. A bill of impeachment would then go to the Senate for trial, as we’ve seen twice before recently. Do you think the mainstream media can avoid covering that?

      You must conclude that there is no way that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. He may resign rather than face impeachment. And then what? I’ll tell you what: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. starts making-over the Democratic Party the way that Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party in 2016. Bobby Kennedy has the tremendous advantage of standing completely outside the matrix of corruption, lying, and Woke mental illness that the Dems have made of themselves, and the voters are going to notice, even if The New York Times doesn’t.

70-80 Year Olds In Cognitive Decline Are Unemployable Yet They're Exclusively Running The Country

counterpunch  |  Our government is run by second-raters. Mediocrities in the state department and national security apparatus have seized the political steering wheel, because president Joe Biden, like senator Dianne “No Show” Feinstein and many others in our extensive gerontocracy do not inspire confidence. And the results are disastrous for Americans. De-dollarization across much of the planet and the possibility of a two-front, conceivably radioactive war against China and/or Russia. You think these two developments sound far-fetched? Well, the former is already underway, and as for the latter, rabid neo-cons and jingoistic four-star generals have stepped into the vacuum at the top and on your TV screen, and these dimwits can’t imagine losing, so now we move closer than ever before, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to igniting nuclear Armageddon.

Just picture the Ukrainian drone that struck the Kremlin May 3 and ask yourself what would have happened had a Russian drone collided with the roof of the white house? The U.S. might well have launched nuclear missiles – amirite? We denizens of planet earth are all very lucky, and especially those of us who reside in American cities, that Russian leaders were rational enough not to target western metropolises with nuclear warheads. They have made clear that they won’t be further provoked, even by preposterous U.S. media claims that the Kremlin droned itself, claims that reveal yet again two sorry facts: first, our press outlets think we are morons and second, they parrot CIA talking points.

That’s the hot war. Then there’s the economic one. Dollar boosters like Treasury secretary Janet Yellen like to note that it would be very difficult for any other country’s money to replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. True enough. But who says the world has to HAVE a reserve currency? What China, Russia and the Global South show, as they stop trading in dollars and dump U.S. Treasuries, is that they can conduct business in their own currencies and will do so, having witnessed Washington’s idiotic sanctions on numerous nations and thus having been terrorized by the imbecilic weaponization of the dollar. So most of the world, aside from the west, now takes steps to abandon the U.S. financially. The dollar’s reign is ending, and soon we Americans will face a radically altered and indisputably grimmer future. All thanks to the stupidity of the very pedestrian people at the top in Washington, starting back in the Clinton administration.

As for the China-Russia alliance, anyone with a brain could see that coming. But not our congressmembers. And those forewarned had not a care in the world. As long ago as 1997, senator Joe Biden proclaimed: “And then the Russians say to me ‘You keep expanding NATO, we’re going to make friends with China.’ I almost burst out laughing. I could barely contain myself, I said ‘Good luck to you guys. If China doesn’t work out, try Iran.’” Well, who’s laughing now? Not the U.S. president, who can’t even get China’s leader to answer his phone calls. Not the American people, who, according to some polls (58 percent, said a Reuters-Ipsos poll in October), worry that this administration of very unexceptional people will enrage the Russia-China colossus and thus stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile congress throws gasoline on this political dumpster fire with its Ukrainian Victory Resolution. In the House, Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen and South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson sponsored this bill. A companion resolution, introduced by senators – Connecticut Dem Richard Blumenthal, liberal darling and Rhode Island Dem Sheldon Whitehouse, and South Carolina Republican Lindsay “Bombs Away” Graham – now percolates through that chamber of the capitol. This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over,” according to Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft April 28.

This is called asking for trouble. Because these are precisely the points that led to Russia’s invasion in the first place. Moscow tried to negotiate over Kiev joining NATO, but Washington turned up its nose. And as far as the Russians who populate the Donbas are concerned, well, it looked like Ukraine had ethnic cleansing for them on the schedule, and the west didn’t object. So Russia invaded. In short, congress now actively touts its own recipe for nuclear World War III, since that is what the Ukrainian Victory Resolution will bring.

The Dollar Is Finally Being Dethroned

unherd  |  In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

 

Balkanization And Neofeudalism In Competition With Globalism

unherd  |  When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

 

 

Politicians Seeing "Which Way The Wind Blows" On Homeless Eliminationism

vice  |  New York City’s mayor and the state’s governor, who have tied their reputation to increasing the vaguely-defined feeling of safety that people get on the subway, were alternately vague or quick to deflect blame. When asked about the killing on Wednesday, Governor Hochul initially said, "People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior." It was not clear who was deserving of consequences, in Hochul’s view, but many interpreted it to be Neely. 

On Thursday, Governor Hochul tried to strike a different tone, saying, ​​"I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on our subway trains. And so our hearts go out to his family. I’m really pleased that the district attorney is looking into this matter. As I said, there had to be consequences.” After apparently viewing the video, she said, “the video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him, I would say it was a very extreme response.”

Mayor Eric Adams is more hesitant to denounce Neely’s killing.“There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to Gothamist. “However,” he added in his statement, “we do know that there were serious mental health issues in play here, which is why our administration has made record investments in providing care to those who need it and getting people off the streets and the subways.” In a CNN interview, Adams called comptroller Brad Lander and others “irresponsible” for labeling the man who killed Neely a vigilante and calling his killing a lynching. 

When asked during the same interview whether it was right to intervene, Adams, a former transit cop, told interviewer Abby Phillip of CNN: “We have so many cases where passengers assist other riders. And we don't know exactly what happened here,” he said.

Adams has been intentionally provocative on the issue of houselessness: he made a rhetorical show of increasing sweeps of encampments, though they have more or less proceeded at the same pace as under his predecessor, who made 9,600 sweeps during his tenure. In November, he instructed police and medical workers that they can involuntarily detain people who appear mentally ill and homeless, though so far it hasn’t led to more people being taken to the hospital.

The statement released by Daniel Penny’s lawyers seemed to mostly reflect Adams’ perspective, pointing to the mental health crisis as the real culprit. They also presented Penny’s actions as a group attempt to maintain order and safety: “Daniel, with the help of others, acted to protect themselves, until help arrived,” they wrote.

The idea that visible homelessness means public order is breaking down, with an attendant rise in violent crime, is a powerful narrative being pushed by right-wingers and the wealthy, but Democratic mayors and civic leaders also participate in this rhetoric. Predictably, vigilantism has become normalized across the country. 

There have been a few high-profile cases just in the last few weeks where these violent fantasies are on full display. In San Francisco, a businessman named Don Carmigniani claimed to have been assaulted by an unhoused person wielding a metal pipe on April 5, and a 24-year old man named Garrett Doty was arrested for it.  

During the criminal case against Carmigniani’s assailant, video was released showing Carmigniani moments earlier approaching Doty while he was lying on the sidewalk and appearing to spray him with bear spray before Doty, startled, gets up and is confronted by Carmigniani, who a third party witness said was threatening the unhoused man. Based on police reports, defense attorneys alleged that Carmiginiani was regularly spraying houseless people with bear spray. Prosecutors later told the 52-year-old Carmigniani that they were dropping charges against Doty.

When tech executive Bob Lee was murdered in April, tech executives including Elon Musk blamed the killing on out of control violent crime. (According to Mission Local, violent crime in San Francisco is still near historic lows.). When police arrested a suspect, it turned out to be another tech executive, Nima Momeni, who had allegedly stabbed Lee. 

The rush of some in the tech sector to cast blame made sense, as the industry is complicit in this crisis: aside from causing rents to spike and exacerbating the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area, the Citizen app enables vigilantism,  and NextDoor is a cesspool of NIMBYism and anti-homeless rhetoric, 

Public camping bans have sprung up independently all over the country, and a single conservative think tank headed by a co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir  has successfully made it a felony to sleep outdoors  in multiple states.

 

Once Upon A Time America Had Better Politicians And Better Policies...,

nps.gov  |  The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established by Congress on March 31, 1933, provided jobs for young, unemployed men during the Great Depression. Over its 9-year lifespan, the CCC employed about 3 million men nationwide. The CCC made valuable contributions to forest management, flood control, conservation projects, and the development of state and national parks, forests, and historic sites. In return, the men received the benefits of education and training, a small paycheck, and the dignity of honest work. Three CCC companies operated in the North Dakota badlands between 1934 and 1941, contributing to projects that today’s visitors can still appreciate.
 
Companies and Camps
The North Dakota State Historical Society sponsored the three CCC companies that worked in the badlands from 1934 to 1941. All three CCC companies in the badlands arrived in 1934. About 200 men were assigned to each company.

When CCC Companies 2767, 2771, and 2772 arrived, the men lived in tents until buildings could be erected at their camps. When completed, each camp included a full complement of buildings: barracks, mess hall, recreational hall, bath house, latrine, supply, garage, and headquarters. The camp complex also included its own classrooms, hospital, barber shop, post office, canteen, and sometimes a theater. The buildings were frame structures heated by wood and coal burning pot-belly stoves.

Company 2767’s camp was located on the west bank of the Little Missouri River in what is now the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park from July, 1934 to 1937. Companies 2771 and 2772 established camps adjacent to one another in 1934 on the north bank of the Little Missouri River near what is now the entrance to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Company 2771 moved out in 1935, but Company 2772 remained until the fall of 1939. In 1939, Company 2771 moved to a site on the east bank of the Little Missouri River just south of Jones Creek, which they occupied until November, 1941.
 
The Work
The CCC sought to provide the maximum opportunity for labor at a minimum cost for materials and equipment. With little more than strong backs, shovels, and picks, the CCC built roads, trails, culverts, and structures. When building structures, the CCC utilized native materials, such as the local sandstone, which they quarried themselves with star drills, sledge hammers, muscle, and sweat.

In the badlands, the CCC, along with the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked on numerous projects. Even as the men were working on these construction projects, it was unclear who would ultimately be responsible for managing these recreation areas; Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park was not established until 1947.

In the North Unit of the park, the CCC built the two picnic shelters in the Juniper campground area and the River Bend Overlook shelter. In the South Unit, the CCC built the now-abandoned East Entrance Station, the entrance pylons, and portions of the park's roads and trails. The CCC also built structures at the nearby Chateau de Mores State Historic Site.
 
CCC Work Crew
A CCC veteran who worked in the badlands reflected on the 50th anniversary of the CCC, "You learned how to live with other men, you learned self esteem ... you learned about yourself."

The People
The CCC was open to unemployed men ages 17 to 23.5 who were U.S. citizens. Enrollees served 6-month terms, and were allowed to re-enroll at the end of each term up to a maximum of two years. A CCC worker’s salary was $30 a month, most of which the men sent home to their families. Meals, lodging, clothing, medical, and dental care were all free for enrollees. The men generally spent $5 to $8 of their monthly salary on toiletries, postage, haircuts, and occasional entertainment. The few enrollees promoted to Assistant Leader and Leader positions earned a bit more, $36 and $45 per month, respectively.

While the CCC men lived and worked on a regimented schedule, there was time for continuing their education through evening classes and for leisure activities on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Living and working together, the men learned to get along. Some formed life-long friendships.

As the generation who participated in the CCC passes, the legacy of their work lives on. When you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drive the roads, stop at the River Bend Overlook, or hike out to the old East Entrance Station. Take a few moments to reflect on the CCC, the men who labored on these projects, and the investment America made during its most desperate economic period. The Civilian Conservation Corps' hard work all those years ago still continues to pay off today.

No Universal Basic Income - ONLY A National Works Relief Program

wikipedia  |  The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects,^[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was set up on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal.

The WPA's first appropriation in 1935 was $4.9 billion (about $15 per person in the U.S., around 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP).^[2] Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA supplied paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks, schools, and roads. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges, in addition to many airports and much housing.

At its peak in 1938, it supplied paid jobs for three million unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA employed 8.5 million people (about half the population of New York).^[3] Hourly wages were typically kept well below industry standards.^[4]: 196 Full employment, which was reached in 1942 and appeared as a long-term national goal around 1944, was not the goal of the WPA; rather, it tried to supply one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.^{[5]: 64, 184}

In one of its most famous projects, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.^[1] The five projects dedicated to these were the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). In the Historical Records Survey, for instance, many former slaves in the South were interviewed; these documents are of immense importance to American history. Theater and music groups toured throughout the United States and gave more than 225,000 performances. Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the development of professional archaeology in the US.

The WPA was a federal program that ran its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments, which supplied 10–30% of the costs. Usually, the local sponsor provided land and often trucks and supplies, with the WPA responsible for wages (and for the salaries of supervisors, who were not on relief). WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration programs (FERA).^[5]: 63 It was liquidated on June 30, 1943, because of low unemployment during World War II. Robert D. Leininger asserted: "millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance (the dole) because it maintained self-respect, reinforced the work ethic, and kept skills sharp."^[6]: 228

Putting Jobless And Homeless Americans Back To Work

livingnewdeal  |  The CWA was created on November 9, 1933 by Executive Order No. 6420B, under the power granted to President Roosevelt by Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 [1]. Harry Hopkins was made head of the CWA.

Like other New Deal emergency employment programs, the CWA was designed to put jobless Americans back to work and to use them on beneficial public projects. More specifically, the CWA was designed to be a short-lived program to help jobless Americans get through the dire winter of 1933-34 [2]. It did just that: Two months after its start, the CWA had 4,263,644 formerly unemployed workers on its payroll [3].

The CWA received funding from the Public Works Administration ($400 million), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration ($89 million), and an appropriation from Congress ($345 million) [4]. At its launch, two million workers came over from FERA and “Nine million people swarmed to the [United States Employment Service] offices to apply for the other two million slots” [5].

The accomplishments of the CWA included 44,000 miles of new roads, 2,000 miles of levees, 1,000 miles of new water mains, 4,000 new or improved schools, and 1,000 new or improved airports [6].

Remarking on the program a few years after its termination, Harry Hopkins wrote: “Long after the workers of CWA are dead and gone and these hard times forgotten, their effort will be remembered by permanent useful works in every county of every state. People will ride over bridges they made, travel on their highways, attend schools they built, navigate waterways they improved, do their public business in courthouses and state capitols which workers from CWA rescued from disrepair. Constantly expanded and diversified to offer use for the special skills and training of different types of workers, the CWA program finally extended its scope to almost every kind of community activity. We had two hundred thousand CWA projects” [7].

The CWA ended in July of 1934 (although most employment ended by March 31, 1934) [8], but its success was so remarkable and its closure so clearly felt that it was recreated in the form of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935; and the WPA was led by some of the same administrative workers from FERA and CWA.

Sources: (1) The American Presidency Project, Franklin D. Roosevelt: 167 – Executive Order No. 6420B, November 9, 1933, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14548, accessed February 9, 2015. (2) Harry L. Hopkins, Spending to Save: The Complete Story of Relief, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1936, p. 116. (3) Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007, p. 47. (4) See note 2 at p. 117. (5) See note 3 at p. 46. (6) Ibid. at 51. (7) See note 2 at p. 120. (8) Works Progress Administration, Analysis of Civil Works Program Statistics, Washington, DC, 1939, p. 6.

More-Broad-Smythies Theory: A Radical Monism Of Space And Sentience

iai  |  The first affirmation of the possibility of a fourth spatial dimension comes through the Cambridge Platonist Henry More in his book of 1659, The Immortality of the Soul, where he calls the fourth dimension spissitude. This rather spiritual apprehension of hyperspace was reflected in the twentieth century by certain writings [31] of the Welsh, Oxford philosopher H. H. Price – who, incidentally, was one of the first philosophers to write on the psychedelic (mescaline) experience. [32] In his later book of 1671, the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, More explicitly writes that ‘besides the three dimensions which are filled with all extended material things, a fourth must be admitted, with which coincides the spirit’. [33] A century later in 1746, in his very first publication, Immanuel Kant considers hyperspace as the condition of other universes:

‘If it is possible that there are extensions of different dimensions, then it is also very probable that God has really produced them somewhere. For his works have all the greatness and diversity that they can possibly contain. Spaces of this kind could not possibly stand in connection with those of an entirely different nature; hence such spaces would not belong to our world at all, but would constitute their own worlds. I showed above that, in a metaphysical sense, more worlds could exist together, but here is also the condition that, as it seems to me, is the only condition under which it might also be probable that many worlds really exist.’ [34]

In Kant’s later transcendental idealism, space is not taken as real but rather as a mere human mode of perception through which we frame the real, noumenal, world. Consequently, one can say, the three dimensions of space are but a human projection, not of necessity an actual reality. If space is subjective, then its observed three dimensions cannot be considered a necessarily objective limitation. One of the pioneers of Relativity, the great French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré was in agreement:

‘the characteristic property of space, that of having three dimensions, is only a property of our table of distribution, an internal property of the human intelligence … . [We] could conceive, living in our world, thinking beings whose table of distribution would be four dimensional and who consequently would think in hyperspace.’ [35]

It was, arguably, Kant’s conjectures that sparked the later interest in the fourth dimension, especially in the later nineteenth century. As one of the most prominent popularizers of hyperspace, the British mathematician Charles Hinton, expressed it in 1888:

'the exploration of the facts of higher [dimensional] space is the practical execution of the great vision of Kant’. [36]

We will leave to the side the controversial question as to whether time can properly be a dimension of space. [37] But looking back in time, we see that in the shadow of Kant, concepts pertaining to the fourth dimension were being considered in serious fashion by a series of first-rate mathematicians. [38] These mathematicians, first and foremost the German Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, discovered that spaces of any number of dimensions, n-dimensional space, were not contradictory or paradoxical, but in fact intelligible and systematically congruent.

Riemann was the student of the equally great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

In the words of the prominent logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach, ‘[in] analogy to [Gauss'] auxiliary concept of the curvature of a surface … Riemann introduced the auxiliary concept of curvature of space’. [39] That is, the curvature of three-dimensional space itself into a fourth dimension, analogous to the curvature of a two-dimensional sheet into a third dimension. Riemann’s ultimate end was to simplify the laws of nature through his complexification of the laws of geometry – for instance by reducing “force” to curvature.

But the physics of Riemann’s age was behind the mathematics, and so his endeavour to explain natural law through geometry was unfulfilled. But his geometry did enable the new physics to come: the theories of Relativity. As physicist and a co-founder of string theory Michio Kaku puts it, ‘Einstein fulfilled the program initiated by Riemann 60 years earlier, to use higher dimensions to simplify the laws of nature.’ [40] The well-known instance of this is the reduction of the “force” of gravity to spacetime curvature. As Bertrand Russell puts it:

‘the sun exerts no force on the planets whatever. Just as geometry has become physics, so, in a sense, physics has become geometry. The law of gravitation has become the geometrical law that every body pursues the easiest course from place to place, but this course is affected by the hills and valleys that are encountered on the road.’ [41]

The notion that imperceptible spatial curvature is perceived through forced feeling rather than vision is one that was brought out through the English translator of Riemann’s aforementioned paper, the great mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford. [42] In the 1870s Clifford wrote of a hypothetical one-dimensional worm (AB) that lived in a thin oval tube, endlessly circling it clockwise, without any degree of freedom to go counter-clockwise let alone escape “up” or “down” (which would be useless concepts or intuitions to the worm). The worm itself would not even see the second dimension, that is, the oval-like shape in which it lives its life. However it would perceive differences in extra-dimensional curvature (i.e. two-dimensional curvature) as bodily feelings, because its body would curve more at points of acute curvature (viz. H, E, F, and G in Figure 2). [43]

Figure 2: Clifford’s one-dimensional worm

Clifford writes that:

‘a being existing in these [<3] dimensions would most probably attribute the effects of curvature to changes in its own physical constitution in nowise connected with the geometrical character of its space. … [If we consider ourselves,] changes in shape may be either imperceptible … or if they do take place we may attribute them to “physical causes” – to heat, light, or magnetism – which may be mere names for variations in the curvature of our space. … [We may be] treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of our space; … some or all of those causes which we term physical may … be due to the geometrical construction of our space … variation in the curvature of our space…’ [44]

Following Einstein’s revelations [45] we see how advanced Clifford was, at least with regard to the feeling of gravity. Yet there are perhaps further developments to be made in this field relating extra-dimensional curvature to qualia [46] – thereby correlating not just force to geometry but qualia too. That is to say that a relation of (n-dimensional) space and sentience is here suggested.

Mathematicians and physicists, then, have given feasibility to the idea of n-dimensional space. [47] We have seen how Clifford relates such space to sentience, let us augment this relation by looking at the ideas of John R. Smythies (1922 – 2019), a neurophilosopher and associate of psychedelic cognoscenti Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond. Smythies provides two sub-theories through which we can understand the relation of space to sentience:

Theory I: ‘Sense-data[48] ... are spatial entities distinct from physical objects and bear temporal and causal relations but no spatial relations to physical objects.’[49] – i.e. an exclusive theory.

Theory II: ‘Sense data … are spatial entities distinct from physical objects and bear both temporal and causal relations and higher-dimensional spatial relations to physical objects.’ [50] – i.e. an inclusive theory.

Theory I is taken by certain figures such as H. H. Price[51] and Bertrand Russell, [52] but Smythies considers Theory II preferable as it is more parsimonious and offers a contiguous spatial connection between mind and matter; mind-matter spatial relations that would be lacking in Theory I (which would then only have temporal (i.e. successive) and causal (i.e. transordinal) relations between physical space (PS) and visual space (VS).

Theory I advances that all the three-dimensional spaces of all beings’ sense data, and the one three-dimensional space of physicality are a multiplicity of separate spaces. In emergentism, each VS would ‘emerge’ from sections (such as those within brains) of the singular PS. We have already hinted at the inadequacy of this mysterious transordinal upward transition. Theory I would require causal rather than spatial relations between all myriad spaces, and thus would be an emergentism, and thus the mystery of transordinal nomology emerges once more. Thus we reject Theory I.

Theory II then advances the actuality of a unified space of multiple dimensions (= n-dimensional space) in which all of VS and PS are cross-sections. Moreover, Smythies agrees with psychiatrist Paul Schilder that the perception of PS is VS. He quotes Schilder thus: ‘The space in which objects are perceived and the space in which they are imaged, are one and the same.’ [53] This in turn implies, Smythies writes, that ‘[in] this n-dimensional space Scientific Space [PS] and a visual field [VS] would not be two different kinds of section but would merely be two different sections.’ [54]

This is not to say that PS is not real but rather to say that our access to it is through VS (plus other senses) which is prosaically three-dimensional. Thus the reality of physical space as more than three-dimensional is not falsified by our common perception of it as three-dimensional. I write ‘prosaically’ because it may be possible to visualize objects of more than three spatial dimensions – Smythies does suggest that ‘[t]here is no a priori reason why we should not develop the ability to appreciate directly an n-dimensional spatial system’, and there are reports of such vision. [55] Indirectly, we can easily conceptualize and work with[56] more than three dimensions of space through algebraic topology using the Cartesian coördinate system where points, areas and volumes, etc., can be located by numeric variables of each dimension’s axis, e.g. point h: (x₁, y₂, z₃). To locate a point in a four-dimensional space, one simply adds an axis and its variable, e.g. point h: (x₁, y₂, z₃, w₄). Ad infinitum. Alternatively, one can visually represent (though not prosaically present) [57] four-dimensional space through for instance a four-dimensional cube, or tesseract (hypercube) – see Figure 2.

The word tesseract was coined by the aforementioned mathematician and author Charles Howard Hinton, [58] whose work on the fourth dimension can be used to our ends. In his essay of 1880, ‘What is the fourth dimension?’ – published four years prior to the related book Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott – Hinton employs analogy to lower dimensional worlds to elucidate a speculated four-dimensional world. I shall briefly explain it, then connect this four dimensional world to the n-dimensional world of Broad and Smythies, so to entertain a theory of the relation between space and sentience. Note that by four dimensions, we are speaking of four spatial dimensions, not a fourth temporal dimension in addition to three spatial dimensions. [59]

Let us imagine a two-dimensional world, a plane, or a Flatland as Abbott calls it, like a sheet of paper. Any beings therein would only be aware of two dimensions, and would only be aware of borders describable with two axes (x,y). Thus they would be unaware of the existence (as we perceive it from our three-dimensional perspective) of the top and bottom faces of their plane that is also contiguous, that borders, their two-dimensional world. Now, we three-dimensional observers could see a multiplicity of such planes, sheets, each floating one above the other. Although each entity of the flatland could not perceive the other flatlands (just as in our world we cannot perceive other entities’ experienced three-dimensional spaces), as they were not contiguous at the x and y axes, we could perceive the multitude of flatlands, or worlds, from our higher-dimensional space – and we could perceive the spatial contiguity (i.e. fundamental unity) of two-dimensional worlds in a three-dimensional space. Thus though each such two-dimensional world would not be contiguous with another two-dimensional world, [60] each two-dimensional world would be contiguous with, i.e. within the same space as, all the other two-dimensional worlds via the intervening three-dimensional space. Thus the relationship between such flatlands would be spatial rather than merely causal, under the perspective of a world with a higher dimensionality than that of each two-dimensional world. The nomology would be of one order rather than transordinal, because the levels would be unified here. Rather than one world emerging from another (as in emergentism), they would each be equally fundamental and unified. Now, let me allow Hinton, 1880, to shift the argument up a dimension:

‘Take now the case of four dimensions. Instead of bringing before the mind a sheet of paper conceive a solid of three dimensions. If this solid were to become infinite it would fill up the whole of three-dimensional space. But it would not fill up the whole of four-dimensional space. It would be to four-dimensional space what an infinite plane is to three-dimensional space. There could be in four-dimensional space an infinite number of such solids, just as in three-dimensional space there could be an infinite number of infinite planes.

Thus, lying alongside our space, there can be conceived a space also infinite in all three directions. To pass from one to the other a movement has to be made in the fourth dimension, just as to pass from one infinite plane to another a motion has to be made in the third dimension.’ [61] 

Thus we place Smythies’ n-dimensional spaces (i.e. PS with a multitude of beings’ VSs) within the Hintonian four-dimensional space so to render intelligible the Theory II relation between VS and PS.

So: through this approach, we exhibit the possibility that though visual spaces and physical space are not strictly identical, refuting the Psycho-neural Identity Theory, they neither need be strictly distinct, as in Substance Dualism. Neither need one (VS) emerge from the other (PS). Through a four-dimensional perspective, we can see that the mental (all of which for James is necessarily spatial) [62] and the physical can be both fundamental and unified, i.e. a mind-matter monism. The imagined triangle and the physical correlates thereof are both part of one n-dimensional space rather than members of distinct categories. This is all to say that the More-Broad-Smythies Theory (Theory II) is one, albeit radical, way to respond to the mind-matter mystery. It is a radical monism of space and sentience.

Whether we can call such a monism an identity theory is merely a matter of definition. Spinoza’s system, for instance, is certainly a monism and has certainly been classified as an identity theory.[63] In this regard, it is interesting to note that Hinton, in the above-quoted 1880 essay, also writes that:

‘In the [four-dimensional manifold] which we have traced out, much that philosophers have written finds adequate representation. Much of Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, could be symbolized from the preceding pages.’ [64]

It is also interesting to note here that Hinton corresponded with William James on the subject of four-dimensional consciousness.[65] Both Spinoza and James were, in the end, panpsychists, and the full extent of the relationship between higher-dimensionality and panpsychism – or more broadly, between n-dimensional space and sentience – is a woefully underexplored world, [66] a world where one may find idios kosmos within koinos kosmos, thought within extension.

Viktor Schauberger And Implosion Technology

 subtle.energy  |  We live in a realm of polarity. Polarity is observable in all things; up and down, night and day, big and small, etc. When it comes to harnessing natural forces for energy, humanity has recently become proficient in utilizing the power of explosion to move our vehicles, light our houses, and run our modern world. Currently, we look towards heat-based technologies that utilize steam, gas pressure, and atomic fission to fulfill the majority of our energy needs.

In our quest to expand our knowledge of mastering this form of explosive energy, we may have accidentally overlooked the potential for another viable energy form, found in the equal-opposite force of explosion; implosion. Renowned Austrian naturalist, scientist, inventor, author and researcher, Viktor Schauberger, noticed this oversight and initiated work to discover the promise that implosion power could hold for our civilization. 

Viktor Schauberger noticed that the interactions of opposites often leads to a spiraling interchange between the extremes of polarity. For example, when a cold front of weather meets currents of hot air, they spiral in, to form a hurricane or tornado. All things move between their extremes of polar opposites or di-polarity, towards the polarity of greater perfection or destruction. 

“Kapieren und kopieren,” or “comprehend and copy nature” is Viktor’s motto, the method by which he gained his inspiration. He spent much of his time in the forest, making great innovative contributions to the timber industry by improving the efficiency of log flumes by directly observing the behaviors of rivers. His deep understanding of water earned him the nickname “Water Wizard.”

Explosion vs. Implosion

Schauberger observed that if the driving force of movement was centrifugal, or spiraling outwards, it would tend towards the being destructive. If the spin was concentrated inwardly, centripetal, the force would favor nourishment and growth. According to his work, Centrifugence led to friction, which leads to heat, which he associated with the intensification of gravity. Centripetence, the opposing force,  would lead to cooling and a lack of friction; therefore levitation.

For example, in nature, hot lava flows deep under the earth’s crust, where gravity continually intensifies towards the planet’s center. However, when water vapor cools, it rises into the atmosphere and floats, essentially levitating over us in the form of puffy clouds. Somewhere in the middle, these forces converge. Water evaporates up in curling spirals, the earth’s crust is whirled away, melted down into the lava.

By using suction, instead of pressure, with the proper applications, energy as we know it today could be revolutionized. Not only would this implosion energy be significantly cleaner than many of the leading energy options of today, it would also lend itself to greater longevity for the equipment used to generate it. Friction and heat can be taxing on materials. This leads machinery to break down more quickly, and more waste to be generated. 

Schauberger considers the choice to rely on combustion engines to be a great error. His belief is that the resources of the world are to be protected and that we are using them up at a great cost, both economically and ecologically. Just as we preserve the body’s fuel; food, by keeping it in the freezer, we destroy its molecular bonds by cooking. The same applies to mechanical fuel. 

If we were to choose to include implosion technology or cooling power, we may be able to stabilize our dependence on natural resources and reach a new renaissance of clean, sustainable energy.

Looking Towards the Future

Schauberger also maintains that the key to overcoming gravity and achieving levitation can be found through implosion technology. Although this tenant is not currently observed in modern scientific circles, recent mainstream media news reports confirm that someone in the cosmos, maybe even from our planet, has clearly mastered what is most likely levitation technology.

 

 

 

 

Viktor Schauberger

svpwiki  |  Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958) was an Austrian man who spent much of his life as a forestmaster in his native country, and as an inventor who had a deep understanding and appreciation for the life energy dynamics of what he quite clearly called water's life cycle. He put forth the scientific idea that water is indeed alive, and as such it can be sterile, immature or mature depending on the cluster size, treatment, motion and temperature of the water. An early invention was for a wooden pipe to carry water. It was believed by Schauberger that in order for water to mature it must not be exposed to sunlight and be allowed to flow undisturbed, meaning to be able to move in a snakelike fashion. What is actually happening in a naturally coursing stream is that there is a longitudinal whirling flow which forms along the length of the stream. In several books on his life and work such as 'Living Energies' by Callum gradient cycles in forests and rivers and their importance to the quality of the water contained therein.

'Understand and duplicate nature' was one of Viktor's most famous sayings, denoting his simple philosophy. In practice this deep understanding of the treatment of water would lead him to create several machines, such as the repulsine, that use the principle of vortex motion in their design. In the repulsine, air is passed through a narrow corrugated chamber created by two plates with impelling blades along the outer edge, so as to create a suction turbine. In one experiment Viktor plotted the resistance of three test pipes to water flow. He found that the first, glass, increased at about a 40 degree angle on the chart. Copper was a little less, about a 30 degree angle. A spiraling copper pipe plotted a variation over various flow rates, however at one point on the graph it drops below zero, denoting the 'sweet spot' where the flowrate temperature and volume of the water all match up. Schauberger found that the ideal temperature for water is around +4°C where it is at its densest, before it starts expanding from heat or expanding to crystallize. So in his inventions the suction action would be used to further cool the water - if it can be controlled to stay in the sweet spot by its own suction action, then efficiency goes up considerably.

Viktor Schauberger was also an avid farmer. He devised a heart-shape spiral plough in which soil is turned out in a longitudinal spiral as it passes through the blades of the plough. He alo found that the copper content of the soil is important, and to use copper or copper coated tools is much better than steel ones. The reasons involve electrical charge of the water and how it interacts with dissolved minerals in the soil. [no source given] 

Viktor Schauberger on his observation of Nature, particularly water:

The Schauberger’s principle preoccupation was directed towards the conservation of the forest and wild game, and even in earliest youth my fondest desire was to understand Nature, and through such understanding to come closer to the truth; a truth that I was unable to discover either at school or in church.

In this quest I was thus drawn time and time again up into the forest. I could sit for hours on end and watch the water flowing by without ever becoming tired or bored. At the time I was still unaware that in water the greatest secret lay hidden. Nor did I know that water was the carrier of life or the ur-source of what we call consciousness. Without any preconceptions, I simply let my gaze fall on the water as it flowed past. It was only years later that I came to realise that running water attracts our consciousnesses like a magnet and draws a small part of it along in its wake. It is a force that can act so powerfully that one temporarily loses one’s consciousness and involuntarily falls asleep.

As time passed I began to play a game with water’s secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one’s own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water.

When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water’s most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people’s notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see.

By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand. [Viktor Schauberger]

''Nature is not served by rigid laws, but by rhythmical, reciprocal processes. Nature uses none of the preconditions of the chemist or the physicist for the purposes of evolution. Nature excludes all fire on principle for purposes of growth; therefore all contemporary machines are unnatural and constructed according to false premises.

Nature avails herself of the bio-dynamic form of motion through which the biological prerequisite for the emergence of life is provided. Its purpose is to ur-procreate [re-create the primary, the essence of] ‘higher’ conditions of matter out of the originally inferior raw materials, which afford the evolutionally older, or the numerically greater rising generation, the possibility of a constant capacity to evolve, for without any growing and increasing reserves of energy there would be no evolution or development.

This results first and foremost in the collapse of the so-called Law of the Conservation of Energy, and in further consequence the Law of Gravity, and all other dogmatics lose any rational or practical basis.'' [Viktor Schauberger, source : from "Implosion" no. 81 re-printed in Nexus magazine Apr-May 1996]

 

UAP From Under The Sea

the-sun  |  Drawing together the nuclear and underwater theories, Mr Heseltine said: "If you think about it if there was World War 3 and we made toxic all the water then that would affect their habitat.

"That's why I think think there's correlation with water - they have bases and we only know 5% of the ocean."

UAPs have become a hot topic issue as the deadline approaches for the report, with more and more US military footage leaking and pressure mounting on governments to come clean.

And so far there are no definitive public answers as to what appears to be happening in our skies.

However, US officials have started taking the unprecedented step of confirming the authenticity of strange videos filmed by warships and warplanes.

And they have admitted they do not know the origin of the unusual objects as calls grow in the US for widespread disclosure to figure out what - if anything - the world's governments are hiding on UFOs.

Competing theories on the strange videos continue to rage – with some grounded on Earth claiming the videos capture never-before-seen military aircraft or drones, while others claim it shows otherworldly craft possibly piloted by aliens.

Others however are more skeptical and sometimes even dismissive, claiming the bizarre videos may just be camera tricks, natural phenomena or even outright hoaxes.

“We know that ultimately this conversation will lead to confirmation that we’re being engaged with some kinds of intelligence that is likely to be extraterrestrial,” Mr Heseltine told The Sun Online.

“The things that are being described now were seen and being described in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

“Nothing has changed all we have is better technical equipment like video on aircraft so we can pick things up easier, that’s why it’s being seen more.

“We are saying you’ve got to start preparing people for a massive psychological change – whether it’s now or six months or a year’s time everything is pointing to ET or non-humans.

“Through awareness programmes we want to  prepare people for the shock of this new reality on a global scale because 95 per cent of the world is in ignorance about it.

“Seventy years of past history would say they’ve been here all that time, they’re not a threat."

He explained ICER wants to make sure the public are ready for any potentially bombshell revelations on UFO, saying "we should be preparing the world now".

Mr Heseltine added ICER is working towards being an NGO that has United Nations special consultative status